Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Three years ago the Occupy Wall Street movement got
America’s attention with the cry of “We are the 99%.” Income inequality was put
under a spotlight for a time. But how far did the understanding penetrate?
Unfortunately, not very far.

First, in a recent poll the average American thought CEOs
made 30 times the wage of their employees, which hasn’t been true for 50 years.
Today the figure is ten times as much—over 300 times.

Second, most
people are completely unaware of the extent of wealth inequality, which is
much worse than income inequality. The wealthiest 20% in the U.S. own about 84% of the wealth.
Think about that for a moment: only 16% of wealth is left for over three-quarters of the population. When
you get to the bottom half of the
population, those 155 million people own only about 2% of the total wealth.

To see an illustration of the income and wealth inequality
in the United States, watch this episode
of a TV show I did with Arthur Hancock in 2010.

The chart above, created by Pavlina Tcherneva, an economics professor at Bard College, vividly
shows one of the contributors to the rise of income inequality in the last few
decades. The graph portrays the distribution of national income growth during
economic expansions since WWII. The blue represents the bottom 90%, the red the top 10%. In the last thirty years all the gains have
gone to the wealthy, in fact, in the latest expansion most Americans have been
losers—the truth is most of us don’t even realize we’re in an expansion, the
Great Recession hasn’t ended for us yet.

So how can people be unaware of this development [massive income
inequality], or at least unaware of its scale? The main answer, I’d suggest, is
that the truly rich are so removed from ordinary people’s lives that we never
see what they have. We may notice, and feel aggrieved about, college kids
driving luxury cars; but we don’t see private equity managers commuting by
helicopter to their immense mansions in the Hamptons. The commanding heights of
our economy are invisible because they’re lost in the clouds…

Does the invisibility of the very rich matter? Politically, it
matters a lot. Pundits sometimes wonder why American voters don’t care more
about inequality; part of the answer is that they don’t realize how extreme it
is. And defenders of the superrich take advantage of that ignorance. When the
Heritage Foundation tells us that the top 10 percent of filers are cruelly
burdened, because they pay 68 percent of income taxes, it’s hoping that
you won’t notice that word “income” — other taxes, such as the payroll tax, are
far less progressive. But it’s also hoping you don’t know that the top 10
percent receive almost half of all income and own 75
percent of the nation’s wealth, which makes their burden seem a lot less
disproportionate…

Today’s political balance rests on a foundation of
ignorance, in which the public has no idea what our society is really like.

And the wealthy, in control of the media and the government,
have a vested interest in keeping us ignorant.

Friday, September 19, 2014

Recently I watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a
story of three men prospecting for gold in the mountains of Mexico. It’s a tale
of greed; how the lust for money corrupts the human heart. All of the men are
affected to some degree, and the character played by Humphrey Bogart is driven
insane by the power of his greed. In the end it kills him.

I related this to a friend of
mine who is a devotee of a guru in India. She said, “My guru tells a story of
greed too!”

A yogi went into the woods to find a cave to live in. At the
same time, a group of four thieves were walking through the woods on their way
to find something to rob. The yogi went into a cave, and just as the thieves
passed by came running out, yelling “There’s a killer in there!” The thieves
were intrigued and entered the cave. There they found a pile of treasure. Each
of the four immediately started plotting how to get all the treasure for himself.
The two senior members sent the younger ones off for a cart to haul the loot,
and then lay in ambush and killed them on their return…

My friend couldn’t remember all the
details, but the end result was all four of the thieves lay dead. The treasure
was indeed a killer.

Monday, September 15, 2014

Recently I watched the film “V for Vendetta.” The movie is set in an authoritarian future, and dangerous books
and artwork have long ago been eliminated from people’s lives. But V, the hero who
is resisting the authoritarians, has an underground home filled with books and
art that he has “rescued” from the censors’ vaults. Seeing the books piled high
in one of the rooms, I was reminded of the importance of hard copies.

When information is digital,
access to it can be taken away very easily. For example, if you own an
e-reader, you don’t really own the books on it. The Kindle
Store user agreement makes that very clear: “Kindle Content is licensed,
not sold, to you by the Content Provider.”Amazon can remove a book from your device at any time.

Ironically, the premier example
of this so far are some George Orwell books. The person who uploaded them for
sale on Amazon did not own the copyright. When Amazon realized the error in
2009, those books just disappeared from the Kindles of the people who thought
they’d purchased the books. And there was no notice or explanation from Amazon.

Maybe this seems insignificant
now, but if at some future point we have an authoritarian government, any books
that that government disliked could be disappeared at the stroke of a button.
It’s not so easy to collect and burn every book.

I like reading on my Kindle; I
like the convenience of looking up words and making notes onscreen. It’s nice
being able to pack just one small device that holds multiple books when I
travel. It’s nice not having to dust more books on my bookshelves. Yet understanding
the importance of hard copies makes me resolve to keep buying physical books.

This Mark
Fiore cartoon illustrates the importance of another object that is
being made obsolete by our new devices: printed maps. Who needs to worry about
carrying maps when you can just use your GPS or pull up the map on your phone?
But devices and Internet connections fail, and if you’re out in the wilderness
that failure can be fatal.

Monday, September 8, 2014

This cartoon really impacted me
because I saw it just after finishing Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in
America.

This book was inspired by the
welfare-to-work reform of the 1990s; it attempts to answer the question: can a person
live on minimum wage? Ms. Ehrenreich courageously endeavored to find out by
actually living the life of a low-wage worker (she was in her 50s which makes
her willingness to undergo the humiliations and physical strain even more
admirable). She spent a month in three different cities, working as a chain
restaurant waitress, maid, and Wal-Mart associate. She lived in housing and ate
the food that was affordable at her wages. She lived in horrible places—a tiny
trailer, a squalid motel, and ate fast food because of a lack of kitchen
facilities. Working one job full-time, she could barely afford to cover her
most basic expenses, and she had a lot of advantages: no children, and because
this was a short-term experiment, she didn’t have to worry about medical
expenses or things like clothing (other than what she had to purchase for the
job).

This experiment was done in 1999
and 2000, before the bursting of the dot-com bubble, when the country was
experiencing prosperity and jobs were easy to get. This was also before
corporations learned that they could save money by not hiring people as
full-time workers. Ms. Ehrenreich tried to work two jobs so she could afford a
better apartment; she just didn’t have the stamina required to pull off
cleaning hotel rooms in the morning and waiting tables in the evening.

She also discusses the
psychological effect of low-income work, that it encourages submissiveness and
lack of initiative. At the same time, she makes clear that these are
hard-working people, doing their best with the pitiful resources at their
disposal.

In the aftermath of the Great
Recession, things are much worse, which after reading her account, is hard to
imagine. Certainly, jobs are much harder to get. Ms. Ehrenreich was able to get
a job almost instantly in 1999; today she might have spent her entire 30-day
allotment just finding a job (if she was lucky).

About Me

I'm a philosopher, writer, videographer, and entrepreneur. In 2013 I've released a new book, "We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity." I'm the co-author with my husband Arthur Hancock of "The Game of God: Recovering Your True Identity.